She swallowed her double at a gulp, then leant forward across the table. “You don’t know who I am?” she said. I shook my head. “Then I’ll introduce myself. Miss Pussy Willow, late of the Vaudeville Theatre!” She was a good actress. She had always known how to get the most out of her voice, how to lay the bait for an effect. And she got it all right. I sat back and looked at her, looked at the puffed, swollen cheeks, the pouches under the eyes, the unshapely mouth where the powder caked along the wrinkles, the bulging double chin, and searched there, as one might search in the face of a long drowned friend for some sign of accustomed features, searched for that face, so pretty, so delicate, so appealing, so utterly, so entrancingly soubrette, that had made so many hearts beat quickly fifteen years ago. Not a trace of it. Not a trace of the woman who had once been Pussy Willow, of the radiant creature who had swayed in that great silver dress, before the chorus, singing the song that had been for six months the rage of London: “Love is the song of a girl and a boy.” Gone: all of it. That youth, that charm, that divine mingling of simplicity and wantonness--buried beneath this coated unhealthy mask of flesh and powder. I did not know what to say. She was looking at me in a half-dazed, half-resentful manner, ready to hit back if what I might say should hurt her. In the end I thought it better to say nothing. “So it’s silence, is it?” she said. “Ah, well, I guessed as much. I know what you’re thinking--the pity of it, that’s what you’re saying to yourself. Poor Pussy Willow, you’ll say. Drunk herself down to this. And then you’ll go back home and think what a damned fine fellow you are. And to-morrow you’ll tell your friends up at the club: ‘Do you know whom I saw yesterday?’ you’ll say. ‘Pussy Willow, quite drunk, she was. All her looks gone. You wouldn’t have recognised her.’ And you’ll all raise your hands and say: ‘The pity of it!’ and get self-righteous. And then you’ll go back to your office and swindle some wretched underdog and talk about leaving the world better than you found it. I know your sort. You only come here to get warm with self-righteousness. Ah, you--But, well, I’ll tell you this, mister: you talk about leaving the world better than you found it, but I’ve probably done a sight more good in it than you have.” She paused on a high-pitched note of challenge. But again I made no answer. I knew that I had only to wait to be told the story. I caught the waiter’s eye, nodded, and another double was at her elbow. She gulped it down quickly, as she had the other. She leant forward, warmed, softened, recollective to continue on the note where she had paused. “More good than you,--a blooming sight more good than you. I saved a man once from becoming--well, you know what men become if they don’t pull the reins up tight in the early thirties. Yes, me--I saved a man. It makes me laugh now when I think of it.